Outlook multi-spaces html signature
Our office is running Thunderbird 45.6.0 on Windows 7. We have html signatures composed under Account Settings. When someone replies to a Thunderbird composed message in Outlook, on the included original message the signature ends up with 4 blank lines between each signature line (although you cannot cursor to these lines - the cursor jumps to each actual line). This does not happen when replying to the same message in Thunderbird.
I'm getting complaints. How can I fix this?
Chosen solution
I found the problem. The TBird HTML signature had <html style="margin-top: 4EM" ...>. Outlook does not understand the "EM" units. When that is removed, the signature behaves correctly.
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I see the same with regular body text too. I had assumed that this is just yet another way Outlook mangles email.
I'll have a closer look at the next funny message I get from an Outlook user.
Zenos said
I see the same with regular body text too. I had assumed that this is just yet another way Outlook mangles email.
Yes, I see this body-text mega-spacing with Outlook 2010, but not with Outlook 2003. In the latter, only the signature is multi-spaced.
I would think this rendering thing would be considered a serious problem as most Tbird users are likely to get/send mail to/from Outlook users. Any thoughts on how to fix it?
I suggest checking the message source both upon receipt and after reply is hit. Only then will you know what it is that Outlook is doing to mangle mail.
But my quick google makes it apparent that outlook 2007,2010 and 2013 all mangle mail in the same way due to a poor setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GitPWH0RybQ
Like previous forays into email using Word as the word as the editor, this one is also a mess. Perhaps you could confirm this is the cause of the mess in your case.
I've done further research testing with Yahoo Mail, GMAIL, AOL, and OWA. All render the signature properly only Outlook mangles it. I have found the culprit in the Outlook format ...
The Thunderbird signature is in an HTML table (<tr><td>...</td></tr>, etc.). In examining the format in the Outlook mail, each of these table rows is replaced by:
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:24.0pt'>
followed by the text of the original Thunderbird signature table-row, for each signature table-row. So, table rows are converted to paragraphs which have a top margin of 24 points or 1/3", each!
Clearly, and as usual, Microsoft doesn't feel the need to play nicely with competing products. I'm not sure anything can be done on the Tbird end, but as Outlook is unfortunately still pretty ubiquitous, it would be nice to have some solution that gets around this problem.
Chosen Solution
I found the problem. The TBird HTML signature had <html style="margin-top: 4EM" ...>. Outlook does not understand the "EM" units. When that is removed, the signature behaves correctly.
Modified by Mark Foley
Thank you. That is useful to know. HTML in email is tricky because features that we might regard as trivial or normal in web site design are not necessarily processed as we would expect by email clients.
I found recently that Thunderbird doesn't understand the preferred replacements for bold and italic text. It wants <b> and <i>, not <strong> and <em>. And having typed that, I wonder if there is now a confusion between em as shorthand for "emphasis" versus its use as a typographer's spacing measurement.